Do not adjust your life

Bhutan is a remote mountain kingdom which has shunned the world and its technological advances - its capital doesn't even have a single traffic light. Now the leaders of this Buddhist society have decreed that the people are 'sufficiently educated' to receive television for the first time. But can centuries of tradition survive the coming of the box? Peter de Jonge reports from the Dragon Kingdom

Overlooking Thimphu, Bhutan's capital and the closest thing it has to a city, is a 9,000ft hill called Sangyegang. At the top of it, where the long, thin, spear-tipped prayer flags never stop rippling, a red carpet adorned with loose, elaborate patterns of dyed rice has been rolled to the door of a modest one-storey structure. There, from behind a wooden lectern, Queen Ashi Tshering Pem Wangchuck, the second oldest of King Jigme Singye Wangchuck's four wives - all sisters - steps up to address an audience of A-list monks, ministers and dignitaries.

The afternoon's ceremony falls in the middle of a week-long celebration of King Wangchuck's silver jubilee, and the Queen begins by recapping the milestones of her husband's reign. In the past 25 years, Bhutan has added its first system of paved roads and telephones, an airport and a two-plane airline, and enough hospitals and clinics to extend the average citizen's life span by two decades, to 66.

But now this last and most wilfully isolationist of the Buddhist Himalayan kingdoms - which, through cunning, diplomacy and blind geographic luck, has somehow avoided getting overrun by history - is bracing itself for the most pitiless invader ever loosed upon this world: television. In two hours, a consultant from Hong Kong will throw a switch in the little studio behind the Queen, and Bhutan will begin bouncing one-kilowatt broadcast signals off its age-old hills.

The Bhutanese have long brought up the rear in the global race toward modernity. Serfdom didn't become illegal here until 1958 - and 10 miles outside Thimphu you're still practically in the Middle Ages. Of the country's 600,000 people, 85% are entirely occupied by subsistence agriculture, and are so scattered among remote villages that most of them live at least a day's walk from the nearest road.

The novice traveller might conclude from such scenes that a little television could hardly do these folks much harm; at least they could sit and stare at something that moves faster than plate tectonics. But despite its poverty - the average annual income is $550 - Bhutan has never viewed the preservation of its culture as an indulgence, and has expended considerable resources in its defence.

In the late 70s, the King coined the phrase "Gross National Happiness" to emphasize that, unlike other developing nations, Bhutan would not be bullied into measuring its progress purely in material terms. He established commissions to maintain the country's 2,000 active monasteries, introduced Driglam Namsha, the ancient code of conduct, into the school curriculum, and eschewed the easy money of tourism. Last year, Bhutan, which doesn't maintain an embassy in America, admitted only 6,000 visitors, while Nepal, its neighbour to the west, took in 500,000.

As today's tradition-steeped ceremony suggests, Bhutan is determined to access the latest technologies without losing its distinct national self, to cut some kind of unique deal between the old and the new, and travel what an official planning document calls "the Middle Path". In fact, the country's tortured decision to set up its own television network - called the Bhutan Broadcasting Service, or BBS - has not been made as a concession to western culture but as an attempt to thwart it. For now at least, the BBS will be broadcast only in Thimphu, be limited to a few hours a day and will consist entirely of national news and documentaries about the Bhutanese themselves. The hope is that television will paradoxically help remind the ancient people of the Dragon Kingdom who they are, not who they aren't.

Keeping Pandora's box only halfway open won't be easy. Even before the country's ban on satellite dishes was unofficially lifted just in time for last year's World Cup, 2,000 were already despoiling the landscape. And even if the initial content is a snooze, now that a broadcast infrastructure is in place it seems as if it's only a matter of time before another ancient culture fades to black.

As soon as the ceremony ends, each journalist and his assigned press liaison officer race to their waiting cars and drivers to hustle back down into Thimphu in time to catch the first television broadcast at the home of a "real" Bhutanese family.

I secure a booking in a part of Thimphu called the Lower Market. The house I am staying in is a traditional three-storey structure with the first floor a kind of barn and the top floor an open-air drying shed. Only the second, reached by steep outdoor stairs with railings as worn as an old subway turnstile, is reserved for eating, sleeping - and now TV.

By the time I barge in, three generations of the Tshering family, as well as assorted neighbours and cousins, are seated on the polished wood floor looking expectantly at the Sony in the corner. The broadcast features the King's address that morning to about 15,000 of his subjects packed into the stone terraces overlooking the Changlingmithang sports stadium. King Wangchuck speaks briefly and modestly about the progress the country has made, and then walks out onto the stadium's grassy field (with no security) to greet his guests. Afterwards the tall, elegant 43-year-old King - wearing a yellow kilt-like gho and ceremonial boots - goes to the centre of the field to lead a performance of the tshilebey , which is a jig somewhere between a hora and the sun dance at Club Med.

The television production is surprisingly professional, and most of the people in the Tsherings' house sit rapt throughout. The 67-year-old family patriarch and his 74-year-old wife have never seen a television broadcast before and don't seem quite sure if they should respond to it as official ceremony or routine entertainment. They sit in respectful silence. On the other hand, their daughter, Chenko, spends most of the broadcast chatting and barely paying attention - she has friends with satellite dishes.

Later, a BBS video editor named Ugyen takes me downtown so we can watch people watching television. Halfway up a backstreet we see a flickering blue light outside Sonam Thinley's grocery. We stand on the curb like accomplices at a game of three-card brag and catch up on the local news. We watch a segment Ugyen himself edited. It is about the girl's basketball tournament at a local sports centre. Basketball? I thought the big Bhutanese sport was archery. It was, Ugyen explains, but now with the blessing of the King - who has videotapes of NBA games shipped to him from New York - hoop is huge in Thimphu.

Although the audience is nothing compared with that drawn by some comedians around the corner and even smaller than that gathered for the Buddhist movie, the show has stopped about 10 pedestrians in their tracks. Those who drop off and move on are gradually replaced. Yet there is no sense that they feel as if they are witnessing anything of historical import. Of course, that's how TV works - it sneaks up on you.

The tall Bhutanese-style chalet where the 15-year-old Amin lives with his family just outside Thimphu has panoramic Himalayan views from every window. But Amin, a bony kid in a Titanic T-shirt, only has eyes for Loveleen - a girl not much older than himself, dancing with conviction on Boogie Woogie, a game show brought to him via satellite each weekday afternoon by Colgate toothpaste.

Amin's family has been quietly reeling in inappropriate programming since installing a dish last summer. They watch Chicago Hope and Friends as well as British shows like Thomas the Tank Engine and Teletubbies. And they're briefed by BBC and CNN.

Watching with Amin are his nine-year-old niece, 32-year-old sister, parents and grandmother, all sitting so stiff and still against one stark mud wall that they could be posing for a family portrait rather than watching breasts bounce. And although the images on the TV contrast abruptly with the lifesize painting of Buddha in the prayer room next door, where Amin's father has built an elaborate altar with row upon row of sacrificial water dishes and butter lamps, there is no indication that the family elders are the least bit discomforted by the boogie-woogieing.

Before getting the dish, Amin's family watched videos. Thimphu doesn't have a single traffic light, but it does have 25 video stores. One of the biggest, a shop run by Mani Orsang, rents 350 tapes a night. When I visit, Mani recommends the recent Brian de Palma bomb Snake Eyes. On the racks, I also see films like Shallow Grave.

One night, some Thimphu locals lead me down a back alley to an apartment-building basement that one day a week houses the dance club Ex - so called because all three owners are divorced. I step into a dark, unventilated box where it's about 100 degrees and the strobe light on the low ceiling is reflected in the sweat on the floor. Here, the flower of Bhutan's youth, egged on by a mix of classic dance tunes and unrecognisable Indian mutations, is doing all one room can for Gross National Happiness.

Whenever the great timeless choruses arrive - whether it's from Wild Cherry's Play That Funky Music or Culture Club's Do You Really Want To Hurt Me? - all the Buddhists in the house throw back their heads and yell them out in ecstasy, as if they have stumbled upon passwords to a better world. If I still hold out any hope for Bhutan's chances against pop, they die loud and hard at two in the morning. That's when I catch a glimpse of a young woman named Karma, a ferocious Mongolian beauty in a black sleeveless T-shirt, black slacks and white platform flip-flops. Her fists clenched, Karma makes funky little robot-doll moves as the speakers and dancers wail: "I'm a Barbie girl, in a Barbie world... Come on, Barbie, let's go party!"

But Bhutan's leaders cling to the notion that they can negotiate with pop culture. In the ceremony for the initiation of Druknet, Bhutan's official website, the oldest Queen, Ashi Dorji Wangmo Wangchuck, cheerfully announced that Bhutan would offer 10 days of free mail service to prevent emails from wiping out the art of letter writing. Then, evoking an image as vividly art-directed and patently false as one of IBM's "Solutions for a small planet" ads, she said: "Bhutan's dream for the internet is that its people will gain access to the whole world without ever having to leave the tranquillity of their tiny remote rural villages."

Admittedly, inner Bhutan has a transcendent tranquillity. An hour's walk in either direction can take you from tropical jungles to an alpine ridge. Yet how many Bhutanese will want to stay put in their cosy villages once they've glimpsed the hubbub beyond? History strongly suggests that few people will choose to spend eight hours a day knee deep in mud behind an ox if there's an alternative.

In the end, the only way to slow modernisation is to control it by force. That's what ultimately makes Bhutan's willed provincialism less than charming. In the name of preserving tradition, the most elemental details of your fate, from who gets educated and what you end up doing for a living, are decided from on high.

The day television arrived in Bhutan, the chairman of the Council of Ministers said the decision to create a broadcast network was made because it was determined "that our people had reached the level of intellectual development that was necessary". How much longer will the people of Bhutan - 43% of whom are 15 or under - be happy to turn all these matters over to their wise elders? If the King can have four wives, why can't Amin have Loveleen?